Woman Celebrates Her Own Abortion in a New Play

Therese Ramstedt had an abortion just months ago, and she wants everyone to know about it. At the time, she was 25 and in a happy relationship (the strain of the abortion has since caused them to break up) but her contraception failed, she told the Huffington Post, so she had an abortion, not telling anyone close to her except her boyfriend. She didn’t even tell her mom, who had aborted one of her siblings.

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“I’d never had conversations with anyone about it. I was worried someone would try to make me change my mind. You never know who you’re going to offend,” she told the publication. However, then she decided to shout if from the rooftops a few weeks after the abortion.  “I couldn’t not tell people anymore,” she said.

So, now, she is making her story very public by making it into a play “Mission Abort,” that she’s performing nightly at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In HuffPo, she says

“I remember feeling very confused by my conflicting feelings of sadness, relief, guilt and freedom – while I had no regrets, it was a tumultuous time where I’d suddenly get upset for what seemed like no reason, and I would think about the ‘what ifs’ even when I knew how completely unproductive that is. ”

She is honest about how damaging abortion is to women, but she doesn’t seem to have any respect for alternatives such as adoption. She talks about the sadness and guilt, but also says she has no regrets because she felt she had no option as she couldn’t afford to raise a baby in London. It is a sad commentary that the piece never mentions the word “adoption,” and never suggests that she considered selfless options such as, I don’t know, moving?

“My partner at the time and I were both far too unprepared for that type of commitment – to parenthood or to each other – and it was not financially viable for me as a freelancer in the arts to have a baby in London. So the decision itself was in most ways quite a straightforward one, and I definitely knew almost immediately that it was right for me.”

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It was only straightforward because she did not consider any of the more difficult alternatives that would have involved sacrifice. The sacrifice of carrying the child and putting him or her up for adoption to a loving family who are desperate for a child or the sacrifice or moving to a less expensive city to raise the child herself. She even says she is happy that this experience taught her she is able to have children, while blithely throwing away the child that she was able to conceive.

While I certainly appreciate that Ramstedt was honest about the very real trauma that abortion causes to women, who are undoubtedly victims of abortion, it is a sad commentary that no other options appear even to have been considered.

 

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